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The entitled generation....Are they right?

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Josh:
I am making this post after reading various reviews found around the web bad mouthing various aspects of different things such as file sharing, movie and music sharing, and copying of various media formats. Should music/movies be free or are the content creators well within their right to charge? It seems that society today has produced a group of people who feel everything should be free and that they are entitled to the hard work of others without any sort of compensation. What are your thoughts?

f0dder:
Games and movies costs a lot of money to produce... music a lot less so (unless you spend silly dollars on marketing talentless singers), but imho content producers are well within their rights to be paid for their work. Some people will claim that "you can't compare it to theft since no physical product is stolen", which might partly be right - but there's a lot of people who would have spent money on whatever if they couldn't get it for free, so it's still lost profit.

On the other hand, I think RIAA and MAFIAA (what an appropriate name) are slimy scumholes, and I'd like to see them and their lawyers purged from the face of the earth - they're being totally unreasonable in the way they ruin ordinary people's lives, instead of going after the big-time pirates running copy plants. But of course that's somewhat harder targets, and you can cash in some decent dollars by throwing in-country lawsuits. Sickens me.

It also sickens me how countries are bending over and introducing really nasty and freedom-limiting internet regulation. Obviously it's not going to stop the pirates, but only be a minor speed bump, as always. The digital media copy protections will always be defeated, and p2p will simply move away from centralized torrent trackers to heavily encrypted decentralized networks... private trackers are already using SSL encryption for client<>tracker communication and main site browsing, and people are using forced protocol encryption for client<>client communication. The people behind ThePirateBay are launching VPN services now to protect against the (nasty!) swedish iPRED stuff.

Funny thing is, the thing I hear again and again is "if the media companies would just embrace digital distribution, I wouldn't really bother with this". Obviously nobody wants to spend $ludicrous on drm-infested crap, but if I could pay DKK30 (~$5) to stream a movie for, say, 24 hours at a reasonable quality and without requiring crappy drm-infested custom players, that would sound like a pretty sweet deal to me. For music, if the prices were right, I'd definitely buy .FLAC and cover-art in .PDF - but I don't want to pay DKK150 (~$26) when I'm not receiving a physical product. And again: NO DOYC-DAMN DRM!, and definitely lossless format!

But things definitely don't have to be free. And even though I could easily get more or less whatever I want for free, I actually kinda like supporting artists... especially if I can do it without supporting the slimy record labels.

Eóin:
I don't believe there are many out there who feel things should be free, but I do agree that the situation has gone towards that extreme. However I firmly believe that it is being pushed ever further down this extreme road by the greed of the content distributors (much more so than the content creators). Xkcd nicely summed up the current situation properly.

Deozaan:
[EDIT]I was typing this up when Eóin posted that response. I think the xkcd comic goes very well with my point of view here.[/EDIT]

I think people are just getting tired of buying the same thing multiple times for different formats. If they want to treat us like they're licensing the content to us, the license should allow us to play the music or movie in whatever format we choose.

I think I wouldn't mind paying twice as much for a movie or an album if I knew I could play it on any digital or physical format in the future without having to buy it again. Sure, I might need to pay a couple dollars for physical storage devices (i.e. blank recordable media) but if I have already paid for the right to view a movie or listen to music any time I want, then why should I be required to pay for that right again?

I haven't seen any place where you buy movies or music that require you to sign a lease/license agreement that says you are limited to the format in which you bought it and that the license expires after x years or for the next format. So it's not surprising that people feel like they own the right to view/hear the content for the rest of their life and aren't happy about having to buy it again. After all, rereleasing a movie from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray costs virtually nothing and is almost pure profit. Likewise, rereleasing an album from cassette tape to CD to digital formats also cost virtually nothing.

I'm not against companies making a profit, I just think that if they're going to pretend to treat us like we're paying for a license to the content, they need to sell it as a license (making sure that customers know the terms of the license) and work out a more agreeable license.

I don't think movies/music should be free (as in beer) but I think that once you've paid for the right to see/hear it, you should be free (as in freedom) to convert it (losslessly) to any format you choose and view/listen to the content on any device you choose.

It should also be reasonable that if you own the right to view/hear the content, that you can allow others who don't own the right to the content to view/listen to the content as well, much like having friends over to watch a movie or listen to your music album.

f0dder:
After all, rereleasing a movie from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray costs virtually nothing and is almost pure profit. Likewise, rereleasing an album from cassette tape to CD to digital formats also cost virtually nothing.-Deozaan (April 12, 2009, 02:54 PM)
--- End quote ---
I do wonder how much it costs to remaster an album for a new format? Probably "virtually nothing" compared to the cost of shooting a movie :), but I do wonder. Still, quite the money machine I bet!

It should also be reasonable that if you own the right to view/hear the content, that you can allow others who don't own the right to the content to view/listen to the content as well, much like having friends over to watch a movie or listen to your music album.
-Deozaan (April 12, 2009, 02:54 PM)
--- End quote ---
Not 100% sure about that one, if we're talking more than "a handfull of friends" - otoh, I think it's darn lame that... whoever... want amazon to take out the text-to-speech feature from the kindle2. Come on, be reasonable :)

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